The 1970 movie of Love Story was nominated for seven
Oscars, but won only one, for Francis Lai’s score. Obviously any
musical version is going to be aware of that shadow. Howard Goodall
acknowledges it cleverly by making one number an explicit variation on
Lai’s main theme. Goodall’s score (played here by a piano-and-strings
septet) is of the quality and character one expects from him:
accomplished and thoughtful, avoiding standard contemporary-musical
plangent melodic progressions, somehow identifiably English yet not so
much as to clash with the story’s American setting.

A decision was clearly taken early on that this version would be about
the obvious love story, the one between preppy Oliver and feisty Jenny
at Harvard and thereafter in the late 1960s until her death at 25 from
leukaemia, rather than the more subtextual parallel in Erich Segal’s
screenplay and novelisation, the tale of Oliver and his father
rediscovering their own filial/parental love. Pretty much all we see
here is Oliver needling his father, who responds with the expected
patrician ire; the complexity and development of their relationship is
scarcely hinted at beyond a discreet, wordless show of reconciliation
in the show’s closing moments. Stephen Clark’s book is far better at
the banter between the lovers than at any emotional profundity. It is
also significantly better than his lyrics, which continue to clatter
like clockwork model trains towards predictable rhymes much like his
earlier libretti for The Far
Pavilions and the West End production of Zorro. The exception is the
near-list song “Nocturnes”, in which Jenny imagines the eclectic range
of music she will play to her future children, from Coltrane to Callas.
Emma Williams, who has not previously impressed me overmuch, is
immensely appealing as Jenny, a mischievous Italo-American sprite until
the illness strikes. Michael Xavier is efficient but unsensational as
Oliver, and Peter Polycarpou (now looking uncannily like David Suchet)
provides as solid a foundation as ever as Jenny’s father.

The simplification of story cannot be for reasons of brevity: the show
runs at almost exactly the same 99-minute length as the film. The
result is that the musical, although deftly staged by Rachel Kavanaugh,
does not really stand in its own right, but remains a comment on the
original. Still, I don’t think this Love
Story ever has to say it’s sorry.